Fused Arrow Records

Between 100 and 300 copies. That is the entire economics of Fused Arrow, the New York label Joe Fusaro runs alongside a corporate operations job: press a small vinyl run, recoup the cost, put money in the artist's pocket, bank the rest for the next record. Fusaro produces as Steel Tipped Dove and has engineered for billy woods, milo, Fat Tony, SKECH185 and Fatboi Sharif, which is how a roster fills itself without a scouting budget. The label name is a play on the pronunciation of his surname. What makes it worth watching is a refusal stated plainly: as a label he has no interest in streaming, treating Spotify as a business card rather than a distribution channel, because fractions of a penny per play do not sustain a rapper. The day job funds the presses. The operations training produces a detailed spreadsheet for every release. The gap is that the underground has argued for a decade about how artists actually get paid, and this is one of the few answers small enough to run. Bandcamp Daily profiled it on August 21. Watch whether the run sizes stay small once the audience stops being small.